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Now that the sailboat is built, I'm making a film and Seaweed is going to have a starring role playing the role of Ocean Wave.  For more information on the film, click the link below.

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Photographs by Lacy

I decided to paint the foredeck white:

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And then masked off the interior:

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And painted a coat of primer:

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It was way more work then I had expected, it takes a full day of work to do a single coat.

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IT FLOATS!

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We tried to take it out for a sail... But there wasn't much wind.

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Michael and I painted the interior and transom with a coat of clear sealant in preparation for taking her to sea.

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It was difficult to get the sealant under all the seattops. There are a lot of nooks and crannies on a boat!

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With Michael's help, I got the rigging setup and hoisted the sail!

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Look at the snotter:

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I rigged it as per that website I posted previously and it functions wonderfully.

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Gray day outside.

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Still sanding the interior with 50-80 grit paper. I put a long bevel on the seattop edge, I think it looks nice.

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Nathan came over and gave a much needed pep talk on utility vs. aesthetic perfection. He said the hull is going to be fine. With a couple more coats of paint it will look slick, all the cracking and whatnot will dissappear. He said it's ready to go in the water if I put a little wood sealer on the transom. Thank god.

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His argument on utility was basically thus: a little scratch on a fine sports car looks horrible, on an old pickup you'd never know. So do you want to be a sailor or a boat polisher? For me the answer is somewhere in between. Exactly where, I'm not sure yet but its a great analogy to keep in mind.

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Got the boat flipped back over and restepped the mast.

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Now sanding the interior

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After some research I discovered that the type of rig this boat uses is called a sprit boom. To be honest I was skeptical at first, but the more I looked into it, the more it seemed a rather elegant setup. It was hard finding a webpage that detailed the rigging exactly, but then I found this flikr set:

http://m.flickr.com/#/photos/boatmik/383640391/

It documents in detail the rigging of a puddle duck racer with a sprit boom. If you don't know what a puddle duck racer is, google it. They're very cool.

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